Year: 2020
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My last words on 2020 from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial
Oblivion. Death. The rites we practise to farewell the dead. What better themes to end 2020? This afternoon I have begun a reading plan for 2020 that incorporates listening to audio books, and in one afternoon I have completed, while talking a lunchtime walk and doing the pre-dinner dishes, the magnificent sentences of Thomas Browne’s […]
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Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), the Russian literary critic and philosopher. The text comes from a late work of Bakhtin, Speech Genres, although I took the text from Clark […]
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Fragments from the Burning Archive: Anna Akhmatova
In my study is a box of old index cards with fragmentary thoughts, notes on narratives and characters, and quotations taken from my reading. The box is labelled “Notes to Digitise,” and perhaps that will one day be a retirement project. But for now it is a stimulus to dig deep down into the Burning […]
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The year of fear: 2020 in review
The year of fear 2020 has been the year of the Great Fear. This Fear has locked us down in safety. This Fear has opened the gate to soft totalitarianism. This Fear has sabotaged the freedom, responsibility, associations and independent thought of hundreds of millions of citizens. This Fear has shed the aged liberal skin […]
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The freedom of internal exile: 2020 in review
The freedom of internal exile So much of this year I have struggled with the moral crisis of how to endure and to live well through a corrupt, decaying, failing and abusive regime. I do not mean just the errant minor provincial government that I serve as lowly under-castellan. I mean the wider institutional regime […]
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Cultural fragmentation and the collapse of authority in Western democracies
My repost today comes from 22 April 2018, and seems relevant to the difficulties we are experiencing in our distressed republics today. I also posted something of a follow-up post on the Collapsing New Buildings of Government. Cultural fragmentation and the collapse of authority in Western democracies During the week I was discussing with a […]
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Fragments from my diaries – the year in review
Throughout the year I have kept a diary in a an A5 black notebook of 200 pages or so. I have followed this practice for quite some years now, and when I write the first entry in the notebook will give it a title. This year’s notebooks I titled , “The view from Thucydides Tower” […]
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Viral Meltdown – Year in Review
As part of my The Kaeleidoscope of 2020: Year in Review post I have updated with my reflections on the pandemic and lockdowns in this section, Viral Meltdown Viral Meltdown How could the year in review not begin with the pandemic and the virus? Since January I have followed the story of the coronavirus and […]
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On human frailty in governing
Today I am reposting this piece from July 2019, following the 2019 Australian election. It is newly relevant today as the American republic wrestles with how to save its crumbling political institutions from the oligarchs, their corrupt parasites and mercenaries, and its failing imperial war faction. As Edward Erler asks in The American Mind, Is […]
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The kaleidoscope of 2020: year in review
A tradition that I have embraced on this blog over the last few years has been to write year in review posts in December. In 2019 I reflected on walking through the desert, notes on my reading, the democratic rebuff to progressivism, and walking through the circles of hell. In 2018 I reflected on ambiguous […]
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Cultural collapse: Delhi 1857
Today, I am reposting this response to William Dalrymple’s magnificent The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. I wonder if, over the next 5 to 10 years, we will be conducting sad online mushairas (poetic symposiums) and singing laments for the collapse of the Washington court? Cultural collapse: Delhi 1857 (February 4, […]
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Axel’s Castle, a mirror and an encyclopaedia
Today I am reposting this post from April 2, 2018 that reflected on some of the literary symbols that formed uncanny fascinators in my mind. *** When I was about fifteen, I found Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle in a library. It was my introduction to literary modernism, and their progenitors, the French symbolists. Over time […]
The Burning Archive 